Lum Ale and Discomfort
by Lucillia
Summary: All Han had wanted was a quiet drink and a chance to stew in his misery. Meeting someone who didn't exist had not been on the agenda.


Han sat at the bar nursing his lum ale, ignoring the noise made by the patrons of various species who also occupied the Cantina. When he didn't have a wild and dangerous job keeping hold of his attention and not giving him time to think, his mind always went to...

His mind went to what he could've done. What he should've done. What he shouldn't have done. What he had done and what he hadn't.

There had been too much Vader in Ben. He'd seen it. Leia had seen it. Leia had seen it and blamed herself, because, when it came to the Skywalker twins, it had been her who had been born with Anakin Skywalker's temperament. A temperament which she had handed down to their son who had also inherited his blasted cockiness.

Leia had blamed herself, and their son had seen her blaming herself every day until they had sent him to Luke. In additon to Leia's self-blame, his boy had also seen the fear in his eyes every time there was an _incident_. Though they had seen their sending Ben away as the boy getting much needed training from his uncle who would make a Jedi out of him, their son had seen it as being sent away because he was bad, wrong, _defective_.

Eventually, Ben had seemed to revel in that "defect", seeking to be like his grandfather had been before his redemption. Eventually, he turned. Then, he disappeared and showed up again amongst the leadership of the First Order.

It had been his and Leia's fear of Ben's turning that had created a self-fulfilling prophesy. Because he and his wife had feared the boy would turn and done what they thought would prevent it, his son had turned.

While he had the ever-fading hope that his boy would come back someday, the hope that one day his boy would turn back to the Light as his grandfather had done, his mind sardonically appended every bout of this hope with a comment of "Yeah, and Vader redeemed himself, what? Five minutes before he died?"

"Are you going to drink that or stare it to death?" a woman who had seated herself next to him a moment before said, cutting through his dark musings that were following a path that they had trodden down a million million times before.

He turned to look at the woman. Dark brown hair, brandy colored eyes that were strangely familiar, early to mid forties, somewhat conservatively dressed and giving him an earnest if somewhat pitying look.

Great. Just kriffing great. When he wanted company, he was alone, and when he wanted to be alone...

Time was when he had women in their early twenties trying to pick him up, clean him up, and "fix" him. Now, he'd be lucky if a woman under fifty looked at him twice. Not that he was interested. While they may be apart, his heart still belonged to Leia whom this woman somewhat resembled, but not so much as to get his blood pumping the way it did when he was around Leia.

"Look lady, I'm not in the mood to..." he started.

"Neither am I." she said, cutting him off, a look of disgust crawling across her face, strangely reminding him of Ben when he was annoyed.

"Well then, you won't mind if I get back to my drink." he said, deciding to pretend the woman wasn't there.

He eventually found himself once again seeking either absolution or oblivion in the depths of a tankard he barely touched as his mind ran itself through its now undoubtedly canyon-like rut of self recriminations, of which there were many. He and Leia had married in a mad eager rush after the destruction of the Second Death Star, and Ben had been conceived shortly after even though Leia had been ambivalent about having kids and had wanted to hold off for a while until things were more stable. The first years of Ben's life had been marked by chaos, war, death, and the near-constant absence of one or both of his parents.

"It wouldn't have made as much of a difference as you think it would if you and Leia had waited before you married and had children. One year or twenty, it would just be a different child with a different story that has the same ending, or one that was close enough that it might as well have been." the woman who apparently hadn't left despite the fact that he'd made it clear that he was going to deliberately ignore her until she left said almost bitterly.

"The Dark Side always finds the Skywalkers. The Light Side always finds them again as well, even if it is just seconds before the end. All you can do is hold on to what you have and hope they come back." the woman said, turning her tankard of Lum Ale in her hands and staring into its depths as if it held the mysteries of the Universe.

Wonderful. He'd run into yet another crazy who knew about his history with Luke and Leia and decided to rub things in his face.

He turned to give the woman a piece of his mind.

"I should know better than to go seeking a familiar face in an unfamiliar universe." the woman said, not even looking at him. "Different universe, different events. The whole 'path not taken' and all of that"

"Unfamiliar universe? What, you take a wrong turn in the bazaar on Nar Shadaa and find yourself in a place where up was down?" he said, putting in as much sardonic disbelief in his response as he felt the whacked out statement made by the woman who was sitting next to him staring into her lum ale deserved.

"It was more like a wrong turn near the Maw." the woman replied. "Kriffing midlife crisis making me do stupid things like try to prove I was more than just the Queen Consort to the great Emperor Jagged Fel the First. I just had to go and try doing the kriffing Kessel Run in under ten Parsecs. Had to get way way too close to that particular black hole..."

Han mentally upgraded the woman from "crazy" to "insane" as he shot back with "Yeah, and I'm the King of Corellia."

"No, just merely a descendant." the woman replied before taking a swig of the lum ale she'd been staring at.

"And you would know this how?" Han asked, knowing that his blood ties to Berethron e Solo through Korol Solo had been so thoroughly obscured that nobody but nobody knew about it, though many Corellians had commented on the surname and somewhat jokingly asked. "No, no, wait. Let me guess. We're _family_."

"Got it in one." the woman said sardonically, strangely reminding him of Leia in that moment.

"And, let me guess. You turned to the Dark Side and then turned back." he said coldly, this wasn't funny anymore, not that it had been in the first place, but still...

"Practically a rite of passage for the descendants of Anakin Skywalker." the woman said darkly, glaring into her glass with an expression that once again reminded him of Ben, an edge of pain and bitterness in her tone. "Not all of us turn back soon enough though..."

"Let me guess, Luke became a Sith and started dragging the whole 'Skywalker family' to the Dark Side." he said sardonically, wondering why the hell he was still engaging this madwoman who seemed to think she was related to him and Luke despite the fact that she was too old in conversation. Part of him wanted to stand up for the Skywalkers, well, two of them at least, and part of him wanted to say "screw them all" before he got up and walked off like he had walked away from that part of his life.

"No. Uncle Luke's turn to the Dark Side was short. He soon saw reason, turned back to the Light, and stayed there. My brother Jacen on the other hand... Well, as I said, sometimes the Light finds us in the final seconds." the woman said, looking slightly bitter.

That was it. He was tired of this game or whatever it was and no longer in the mood to deal with this woman who was clearly messed up in the head.

"Look lady," he said coldly. "If you actually knew me or anything about me aside from the tales that get spread around the Galaxy and that lucky guess about the Solos, you'd know that my son's name is Ben."

The woman looked surprised for a second, and then somewhat darkly amused. He was having none of it though. He flipped a credit chit onto the bar and started towards the door.

"Uncle Luke named him, I take it." the woman who was watching him walk away called out behind him.

This gave him pause for a moment, because Luke had indeed suggested the name. He and Leia had agreed with Luke's suggestion, because if it hadn't been for Obi-Wan Kenobi, they wouldn't have gotten together in the first place. He didn't respond to this however, and continued walking.

"My cousin's name is Ben." the woman said with a bit of a laugh as he skirted around a table that was ten feet from the door.

"My name's Jaina by the way!" the woman called out in the instant before the door of the seedy cantina closed behind him.

He stormed through the rundown shantytown that surrounded the local spaceport, his foul mood not being caused by his son for once, but instead by the madwoman who claimed to be his daughter. He didn't know if it was because of the woman's name or what, but as he neared his ship where Chewbacca was undoubtedly waiting, he was struck by a memory from a day long since gone.

 _"What if it had been a girl?" Leia asked, her hand on her not-yet swollen belly._

 _The two of them had managed to snatch a few hours of complete solitude. An event that had been carefully orchestrated by Luke who had known that if Leia was greeted by another well-wisher and congratulated about the baby one more time, she would turn to the Dark Side and start using something from her father's old bag of tricks on said well-wisher. After a few minutes of quiet, their conversation had turned to the one thing that it had turned to at least five times a day since Leia had discovered that her Force begotten instincts were indeed correct in this matter._

 _"I've always liked the name Jaina." he replied as he scooted closer to his wife on the stone bench on which they were seated. This section of the forest they were hiking through had once had a paved walking trail, but the ancient bench that they'd hastily cleared off before sitting down on it was the only thing that remained, the untamed wilderness having reclaimed almost everything with nobody around to beat it back._

 _"What if it had been a set of twins like Luke and I?" Leia, who'd peeked at the little one with the Force at the first available opportunity and learned that it was a single, solitary son, asked playfully._

 _"Well then, their names would have had to start with the same letter like yours and Luke's do." Han replied as he wrapped his arm around his wife._

 _"Jacen" Leia said. There was a far-away look in her eyes, the look she got when she was thinking about Alderaan._

 _Knowing better than to ask, he held his wife a little closer, the embrace turning to a comforting one rather than a playful one..._

"Fierfek!"Han swore as he stopped dead in the middle of the street.

While "Jaina"'s name could've been chance since it was a Corellian one and not an entirely uncommon one, nobody but nobody had known about the name of the non-existent twin for Jaina that Leia had chosen. People who knew Solo wouldn't have picked the name "Jacen" for his son in a million years, and since the destruction of Alderaan, the people who knew enough about the details of Leia's childhood to know where the name Jacen had come from could be counted on one hand with fingers left over.

The woman actually could've been...

Well, it was too late now, and he wasn't going to go back to the cantina to look for her.

What would he say to her anyway? It wasn't like he was actually her father. That was another universe and another him. Why should he commiserate with her over the turning of a son he had never had, but could have? Why should she be forced to share his misery over a "brother" she had never known because he hadn't been born where she came from? The pain over Luke's disappearance and leaving Leia was like a just-barely scabbed over wound, and he didn't need anyone ripping off that scab with stories of a family that he would never know because things had gone differently here. He didn't need to hear a story that he already knew ended with a son turning to the Dark.

That whole encounter had been seven kinds of strange and would've been entirely pointless if it weren't for something the woman who may or may not have been his daughter from another universe said. "The Dark Side always finds the Skywalkers. The Light Side always finds them again as well...".

Han didn't know whether he wanted to track that woman down and hug her or strangle her for giving him another shred of hope to cling to.


End file.
